Like how many times is there a story about "AI" on the front page of Reddit? Can anyone define what that actually means?
In the simplest of terms, AI software is just a giant tree of subtle decision points that evaluates lots ( millions ) of pieces of information and finally comes to the conclusion, that yes - that's a picture of a cat.
When you look at a picture of a cat, how do you know that those colors and shapes in the image are in fact, cat-like ? You, as a person would unconsciously recognize countless features that a typical cat has: Two eyes, a nose, pointy ears, 4 legs, a long tail, fur, whiskers, etc. You know that a cat's fur won't be purple, but might be white, or brown, or yellow, or orange, or black, or gray, or any combination of those. You know that the tail won't be 8 feet long, that it's legs won't have 7 joints that are contorted all kinds of freaky ways. You know that the paws won't face backwards. You know that the fur won't be curly, but could be short. Actually it might even be missing for hairless cats, and on, and on, and on....
So how do you explain to a computer what a cat looks like ? There are countless features and details that defines a cat. Trying to manually write all of the decision points in code would take a huge amount of effort.
So we figured out a while ago how to get a machine to learn all of the varieties of features that defines a picture of a cat using an AI network. You describe all of the things to pay attention to, then train the software using thousands of pictures of cats, and it would adjust all of the decision points automatically to recognize all of the varieties of those cat features. The AI learned how to recognize a picture of a cat. This was great, but it was still very limited, and was very time consuming to setup and troubleshoot. If you show it a picture of a dog, and the AI says that it is a cat - now what ? Why did it decide that, and how do you adjust the AI to correct it. This was the problem for years.
The breakthrough now, is that we figured out how to get an AI to learn how to learn how to recognize a picture of cat. Now without explaining anything to the AI, you can just show it thousands of pictures of cats, and say to the AI "these are all cats, and now you go figure out how to figure out that those are cats", and it will. It will discover that cats have tails, and 4 legs, and fur of certain colors, and whiskers, etc. You don't have to explain any of that.
Now you can show an AI a picture of a dog, and if it says "Cat", you can say "Nope, that's a dog", and the AI will figure out how to recognize the differences all by itself. Now creating applications for AI becomes much faster and easier. You don't even need to define the differences, it can learn how to learn how to recognize the differences.